The Introduction here offered to the use of young Students may claim one merit at least, that of being unquestionably the first attempt of the kind. If, with great truth, it be added that on the compilation and composition of the work a large measure of time and painful thought has been bestowed, that will be a farther plea for its candid and liberal reception with all intelligent readers.

The Author is duly aware, that in the plan here (generally) adopted of stating the approved results of the inquiries of others, he has foregone several opportunities to recommend favourite researches and remarks of his own. Plain practical utility has been his leading object: he might else, in developing the present state of metrical knowledge, have interspersed some instructive and even amusing facts in its history and progress up to the present time.

Many things now familiar to young Academics (thanks to the labors of Dawes and Burney and Parr and Porson and Elmsley) were utterly unknown to scholars like Bentley and to Scaliger before him : and though it might seem an ungracious task, it would not be void either of pleasure or of profit to give select specimens of errors in metre and syntax committed by those illustrious men.

If Attic literature is even now in the process of being delivered from one of its greatest pests, the emendandi scabies, nothing could better illustrate the value of those critical labors by which the deliverance has been so far achieved, than to exhibit scholars otherwise so justly eminent, wasting their fine talents and erudition on emendations crude and unprofitable, which in the present day could not possibly be hazarded.